Week 243 – When Spring Comes In

It has felt truly Spring-like this week, which prompted me to record this song for the blog. The song seemed rather less appropriate when I woke up today to find it was a cold, grey, wet morning – apparently it had been snowing earlier – but I decided not to let that put me off and, indeed, like many a dark and a cloudy morning, it has turned out to be an OK sort of afternoon.

My friend Mike and I used to sing this together having learned it circa 1979 from Bob Copper’s book A Song for every Season – at that point we’d not actually heard the Coppers singing it. In later years this is a song which I’d often sing on a night out with my friend (and occasional commenter on this blog) Adrian. Unfortunately nights out and sing-songs with Adrian happen all too rarely these days, but this is a song which I can’t really envisage not being sung in harmony. So, with the help of Audacity, Dropbox and an iPad, here’s me singing with a bunch of doppelgangers (quintuplegangers?). With a bit more time, this could have been quite a lot more polished. But I didn’t have more time and, besides, I don’t think it suffers too much from the slightly ramshackle feel (or the fact that I was making up most of the harmonies as I went along).

You can hear Bob and Ron Copper singing this on the Topic CD Come Write Me Down: Early Recordings of the Copper Family of Rottingdean. It was also included on the 1995 CD Coppersongs 2: The Living Tradition of the Copper Family, sung by Bob, John, Lynne and Jon Dudley And there’s a 1971 recording of Bob, John and Lynne singing it at the Lewes Folk Club on the British Library website.

When Spring Comes In

Andy Turner – vocals

Week 160 – Rolling in the Dew

Another song from the great Pop Maynard. I first heard this on the Topic LP  Ye Subjects of England but learned it with help from the transcription in Ken Stubbs’ excellent little booklet The Life and Songs of George Maynard (an EFDSS reprint from the  1963 Journal of the English Folk Dance & Song Society, December 1963). The recording on Ye Subjects of England was made by Peter Kennedy. More recently, different recordings made by Reg Hall and Mervyn Plunkett, and Ken Stubbs, have appeared on the Who’s That at My Bed Window? (Volume 10 of The Voice of the People series), and the Musical Traditions compilation Just Another Saturday Night. In the notes to the latter collection, Rod Stradling notes that a significant number of the versions collected by Cecil Sharp were from singers who don’t appear to have sung him anything else:

Maybe this is an easy song to learn and remember, so that someone who didn’t know anything else could trot it out for the roving collector … or maybe it was one of the titles Mr Sharp listed when he asked the singer “D’you know any of those old folk songs? You know, songs like Rolling in the Dew?” I offer this suggestion purely on the evidence that he collected 31 of these examples!

An interesting conjecture.

The song is clearly of considerable age – the printed ballad sheet shown below dates back to 1688 or 1689.

A merry new dialogue between a courteous young knight, and a gallant milk-maid. Printed for W. Thackeray at the Sugar loaf in Duck lane, between 1688 and 1689. From the Bodleian collection.

It occurs to me that the song can be viewed in two ways. It could be seen as typical male fantasy: he makes all kinds of suggestions why the milkmaid might not want to have sex with him, and (wanton, depraved female that she is) she just brushes them all aside. But I prefer to see her as a sexually-liberated, independently-minded woman who knows what she wants, and intends to get it on her own terms.

Rolling in the Dew